Page:Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.djvu/159

Rh eye-teeth cut. He found her uncommon sympathetic. And when Chauncey finally came out of his trance he was the stepfather of the widow's four children.

She was very kind to Chauncey, and treated him like one of her own sons; but she was very, very firm. There was no gallivanting off alone, and when they went out in double harness strangers used to annoy him considerable by patting him on the head and saying to his wife: "What a bright-looking chap your son is, Mrs. Hoskins!"

She was almost seventy when Chauncey buried her a while back, and they say that he began to take notice again on the way home from the funeral. Anyway, he crowded his mourning into sixty days—and I reckon there was plenty of room in them to hold all his grief without stretching—and his courting into another sixty. And four months after date he presented his matrimonial papers for acceptance. Said